Cassini Probe: Saturn’s Moon Titan Home To Oceans As Salty As The Dead Sea!

Saturn is one of the most fascinating planets in our solar system. Always an enigma because of its stunning looks, the planet seems to have become even more of an enigma to scientists after they sent a spacecraft to study Saturn and its moons. The Cassini mission, which is completing its 10th year around Saturn and its moons continues to enrich the knowledge of humanity regarding the ringed planet and its satellites. One moon that has been of particular interest to humans for its possibility for becoming a possible future human colony is Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

According to new data gathered by Cassini, NASA scientists have firm evidence regarding the possibility that the Ocean discovered inside Titan could be as salty as Earth’s Dead Sea. In a media release, NASA says that the new results have been tabulated after studying data sent by Cassini over the course of the past ten years. Using all the data, NASA researchers have managed to present a model structure of Titan. They also seems to have got a better understanding of Titan’s outer ice shell. The findings are published in this week’s edition of the journal Icarus.

Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California says;

“Titan continues to prove itself as an endlessly fascinating world, and with our long-lived Cassini spacecraft, we’re unlocking new mysteries as fast as we solve old ones”

The data sent across by Cassini also suggests that Titan’s icy shell is “rigid and in the process of freezing solid.” The gravity data sent across by Cassini suggested that an extremely high density was needed for Titan’s oceans to be able to cause the gravity data that they were getting. This directly indicated that the ocean inside Titan is in most likelihood a salty brine of water. It is likely to contain high dissolved components of sulfur, sodium and potassium. The study suggests that the density of this brine is roughly equivalent to the saltiest bodies of water we have on earth.

According to Giuseppe Mitri, the lead author of the paper,

“This is an extremely salty ocean by Earth standards. Knowing this may change the way we view this ocean as a possible abode for present-day life, but conditions might have been very different there in the past.”

The data from Cassini also indicates that Titan’s icy crust has variable thickness – akin to that of earth’s rocky crust.

The Inquisitr had earlier reported about our keen interest in Titan and its atmosphere. Titan is believed to be an excellent model of how a primitive earth might have looked a few billion years ago. There is speculation of the presence of building blocks of life or life itself on Titan.

Do you think Titan might be world filled with alien microbes now that you know it contains salt water?

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

[Image Via NASA]